Boys and aggressive play: Why can’t we accept it?

My friend Mark took his two boys to a Berkeley park last weekend. His boys brought their soft Styrofoam swords along, and next to the playground the 4- and 6-year-old engaged in battle, pretending to be dueling medieval knights.

Typical, harmless boy behavior, right?

Well, not according to a mom who was at the park with her three girls. This woman came over to Mark’s boys and said, “Stop that! You are bringing everyone at the park down with your violent play.” (Note: The boys weren’t even near the girls and their “weapons” never touched them.)

It’s tempting to make this a story about pesky Berkeley people, but that has already been brilliantly done many times, especially by local writer Michael Chabon in a 2002 Gourmet magazine article.

And so this will be a story about boys and aggression as well as an attempt to prove this Berkeley mom wrong.

Shutterstock/Jeanne Hatch

Roughhousing: Most experts will tell you that boys benefit from it.

Is ‘violent’ play normal for boys?

Most any parent of a boy has witnessed their sweet, innocent, cherub-faced son turn a pencil into a machine gun, a chopstick into a sword, a tennis ball into a hand grenade.

While many parents view boys’ aggressive behavior as typical, others find it unsettling, at least when it first starts around 3 years of age.

When my husband brought a toy gun home for my son and my 3-year-old aimed it at me and said, I’m going to shoot you,” I grabbed the thing from his tiny, little hands.

Now that he’s 6 years old and I’ve witnessed three years of imaginative play with weapons, I know that I overreacted.

Most child psychologists will tell you that it’s normal, even healthy, for a boy to play with a toy weapon. “Since the beginning of recorded time, little boys have enjoyed games in which they project their power into the world, and that means playing with ‘weapons,'” says Michael Thompson, coauthor of The New York Times bestseller Raising Cane: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. “I have no doubt that ‘cave’ boys pointed sticks at each other in threatening ways, or chucked rocks at one another, or imitated the spear-throwing actions of their fathers.”

Research has found that boys actually benefit from aggressive play. Studies indicate that through “sophisticated play (including games like cops and robbers), children learn to delay gratification, prioritize, consider the perspectives of others, represent things symbolically, and control impulses,” according to a recent article in LiveScience.

Researchers at the University of Maine’s Katherine M. Durst Child Development Learning Center in Orono recently conducted an interesting experiment around boys and aggression. Boys in the program were banned from play involving “bad guys,” and suddenly their imaginations became dead.

“We decided that having banished the bad guys diminished the running and noise level but, also, the pretend play and energy within the classroom. No more extravagant stories were being told and the group of boys who so passionately desired the bad guys were having more difficulty sustaining long periods of play,” researchers wrote.

As I mentioned earlier, when my son got his first-ever toy gun, I was appalled and irrationally feared it might turn him into a mass murderer–even though there isn’t any research indicating that young boys who play with toy weapons become serial killers.

He wrote me back: “Why do boys shoot their mothers? My answer is that a boy’s mother gets to see everything he is proud of or excited about; she is his first and best audience. But why does he shoot at you? Doesn’t he love you? Yes, of course he loves you, and doesn’t really want to hurt you. He’s playing and he is quite confident that his actions won’t really hurt you. After all, he knows that it isn’t a real gun. He just wants to see you react to his imagined power.”

I have to wonder if Mark’s sons noticed those three girls eying their swordplay and if they heightened the intensity of their battle in an effort to show off.